Robert Morgan

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

I think that it’s more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

If a poem is not memorable, there’s probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.